'Looking Around' is a kaleidoscopic collection of essays, with an eclectic range that encompasses all that is to be celebrated, discussed and remembered about the buildings that shape our lives.
History's reverberations great and small are explored - from the Chinese Cultural Revolution to quieter changes in the European living room - and so too are shifts in taste, from modernism to the views of Prince Charles.
Political questions raised by the home are brought to polemical life - the charms of the small home, the poetry of the suburbs, the symbolism of the porch, and the rise of the "androgynous home". Rybczynski sounds out buildings as diverse as museums and airports, model homes and postmodernist dreams, listening for Goethe's "frozen music".
Vastly informed and beautifully written, 'Looking Around' gives us a fresh, close look at the spaces we live in.
